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When I decided to transform my decade-old freelance consulting practice into a full-service agency with my longtime collaborator, Sonal Bains, making the jump was beyond daunting. My entire professional identity had become attached to my practice, and yet I felt I couldn't move on with what I wanted to do for the next ten years without making serious changes. But what, exactly, should those changes be? And how should the decisions get made? Here are a few of the big considerations to look at when going all-in on your business.

1. Having independence versus having structural support. I've valued my freedom more than anything over the last ten years of work. It was longing for that freedom that catapulted me into freelance work to begin with--ask the people I used to work for at my last 9-to-5 job, I just wasn't cut out for the formalities of office life. It's a matter of deciding which stress is more manageable: the hustle of figuring out the next paycheck, or the grind and quirks that come with having a regular job.

But a new kind of grind very slowly started to emerge: I adore the work that I do, but I started to find the responsibility of managing every single detail at every juncture overwhelming. It's important for freelancers to find--or build--a strong network of collaborators and colleagues with whom to bounce ideas around, and that worked for me for a long time. There's a greater appeal to me now in giving up a certain amount of ultimate(-ish) freedom in exchange for having a partner who's as emotionally invested in the same work as I am. I'm learning that structure doesn't always mean constraints, it also means support.

2. The business of equity. In a freelance business, we measure our worth in terms of the dollars that we bill; the intangible equity of our reputations and portfolios is harder to measure in terms of financial, and sometimes social, equity. My business partner, Sonal, brought this to my attention in our first meeting on joining forces. If I were to, say, walk away from my consulting practice entirely, I wouldn't have any equity to show for it. It's almost the business equivalent of renting versus buying. But if I take that reputation and client roster, and put it into a formalized business, lots of things can happen to that business in the future from an equity point of view.

Along those lines, the issues of scale became clear to me at the ten-year mark of my practice. Sonal and I have always collaborated with a diverse and exceptional network of colleagues, but as individuals, it's tough to scale up into series of larger contracts without a formalized business in place. For one, despite all the amazing things that have helped my reputation grow (hello, Forbes! NPR! my speaking gigs! my book!), there is a point where an agency has more gravitas than an individual, and I started to feel that pain point. An agency will allow us to both formalize our relationships with our killer network and ensure that they thrive, as well as provide us with the structure we need to continue to scale up.

3. What's in a name? Everything. Choosing a name was the best--and one of the most difficult--parts of creating the agency. It forced us to talk about our deeply-seated values when it comes to the work we do, and also do a lot of sharing around our hopes, dreams and fears. Sonal and I chose to sequester ourselves away for a few days so that we could create the space to have these conversations, and we began by doing some serious personal visioning. Critical to this process is obviously trust. We've had an excellent working relationship on top of a deep friendship for years, so it was easier for us than it might be for most to make the emotional investment and take risks with our sharing. But those risks and investments are critical to a solid business foundation. Without them, the rest of the structures built on top may well wobble and break.

Then we worked through a series of branding exercises that I've learned and adapted for my clients over the years. Through answering questions like, "What kind of sports would our agency play if it were a person," we were able to uncover the value systems and beliefs we had already attached to this unformed business. And as part of the work, our job was also to come to consensus with our answers. If you think your company plays rugby, and your business partner thinks it plays golf, you've got some work to do on the values or priorities that inform those answers. Spending a day (or more!) digging deep on those questions is incredibly informative. Out of our branding process, we found ourselves drawn to words like "sun," "fire," "flame," "brilliance," and thus, Lux Digital came into being.

There are myriad of other considerations when making the jump from freelance to full-fledged business, of course. Where will you work? How will you handle the money? How will you incorporate? Where will you have your weekly happy hours? But nailing these three--your equity, your scale and your name--provide a trifecta foundation from which to build everything else.